A friend asked me recently how I decide where to go on vacation? From the beginning, I’d always enjoyed social studies and history class in school, but my freshmen year of high school when I took Western Civilizations with Dr. Dan Kelly, I fell in love with history. I knew then that I wanted to teach history at the college level and see the pyramids. I’m a graduate school dropout so teaching history never came to fruition. I left the PhD program in Early Modern European History with a focus in gender and sexuality almost as soon as I started. But less than a year after leaving graduate school, I was in Egypt at the pyramids with Matt. Our time in Egypt opened the world up.

It was two years after September 11th and our families were pretty worried about our safety. I was concerned. Egypt seemed like a scary, intimidating place from back home, but once there it wasn’t. I was more afraid driving on the skinny, one lane, cliff-edge roads of the Dingle peninsula in Ireland than I was in Egypt. That didn’t […]

How Egypt Opened the World for TravelMaggie Downie2018-02-14T16:49:38+00:00

Some friends and I went on a Tree Swallow Cruise with RiverQuest down the Connecticut River last week and if you can arrange it you have to go. It’s really reasonable ($40 per person) for the time (3-3.5 hours) and what you get to see (half a million to a million tree swallows flying around at dusk).

It was incredible, and if you live in Connecticut it is right here for us. So often when I want to see something naturally cool I feel like you have to travel to see it—Mexico for the butterflies, New Zealand for the glowworms, etc. But this is right here.

You bring your own drinks and snacks and board the boat by the Goodspeed Opera House. It takes about an hour to travel downriver to Old Saybrook while Mindy and Mark, your hosts, point out all different birds and information about the river along the way. Shortly before sunset the birds start to trickle in—a few at a time, then a few more, than hundreds, then they […]